V.V. (12) Pynchon's letter to Thomas F. Hirsch

[jbor]

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>From: Dave Monroe <davidmmonroe at yahoo.com>


> A rhetorical
> question, albeit one I perhaps do have a certain
> answer to.

That's pretty much the definition of a rhetorical question, isn't it?

> But waht was that
> which is to be proved there?

I thought, and correct me if I'm wrong (which I'm certain you will), that
your original presentation of the Hirsch letter as evidence had been to
foreground the connection between the Herero genocide and the Shoah, i.e.
these two sentences:

    When I wrote _V._ I was thinking of the 1904 campaign as a sort of
    dress rehearsal for what later happened to the Jews in the 30s and
    40s. Which is hardly profound; it must occur to anybody who gets into
    it even as superficially as I did.

That was the context of the discussion at the time, and it was that which I
thought you were (rhetorically or otherwise) QED'ing about.

> I'd though we were
> discussing somewhat different issues, ceratinly a
> different novel, there ...

Indeed (see above); we had been discussing _GR_, which hadn't as yet been
published at the time of the letter. But the letter and the topic is
certainly relevant to _V._ as well, and to this chapter in particular. Which
is why I cited lengthy extracts from it.

> maybe they are, maybe
> they're not.  Haven't gotten 'round to worrying about
> it much yet.  If you'd care to explicate ... but
> either way, they're still problematic to outright
> mistaken.

OK, this is the crux of it. A notion that the Herero genocide was a "dress
rehearsal" for the Shoah seems to me as if it could (should?) be argued as
just as "problematic to outright mistaken" as the distinction between
literate and preliterate made elsewhere. Pynchon even signals such a
problematisation in the very next sentence of the letter:

     But since reading McLuhan especially,
    and stuff here and there on comparative religion, I feel now the thing
    goes much deeper.

So, on the one hand you were taking this alleged Herero/Holocaust analogy as
a given, but contesting (and at the same time, as you now admit, not even
considering it, in relation to the fiction) the literate/preliterate
distinction, which, to my reading of the letter, is far more
enthusiastically  and energetically presented (not to mention the
Western/non-Western paradigm being set up and those distinct anti-Christian
overtones there). Selective relativity, double standard etc. But
observations rather than complaints, and peripheral to any discussion of the
text/s, surely.

I think that anachronisms in Pynchon's fiction are generally few and far
between, and that when they do occur they are deliberate. But I don't think
that the reference to "nine planets" was a deliberate anachronism here. And,
in terms of Pynchon "hardly writing 'conventional' historical novels", well,
that argument would (or should) apply as much to the Herero genocide and the
Holocaust as to apparent anachronisms, don't you think?

And, you're right, the mechanical solar system within Foppl's planetarium
might also have been called an "orrery", although that term is of a very
British derivation and it is unlikely that it would have been used in that
place at that time. Of course, the two terms are synonymous:

    planetarium n. ... 3. a model of the solar system, sometimes mechanized
    to show the relative motions of the planets [Collins]

best